The Summer Symposium for Higher Education, 2007

The Summer 2007 Program: The Tower and the Cloud

Plato’s Academy was a marketplace of ideas with little or no intervening infrastructure or institutional bureaucracy. Even writing had no place in the Academy, as it was thought to get in the way of the direct exchange of ideas among academicians. Beginning in the 12th century in Europe, higher education was discharged in universities—gated groves where students and professors lived and studied in a close, apprentice-master relationship. Over time, universities grew to become “multiversities” in the 20th century: learning centers that hosted not only learning and research, but the full range of services such as housing, food service, entertainment, grounds maintenance, waste management, and so on. This is a history of institutionalization.

The Internet is challenging the power and authority of all institutions. The blogosphere, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and other developments are eroding the institutions’ authority and markets. Blogging and podcasting are disrupting traditional news media. Wikipedia is challenging encyclopedias. The Google Library and others are redefining the institutional library. Synthetic worlds such as Second Life create the potential to redefine learning space. Virtual markets such as InnoCentive aggregate research talent and reward scientific innovation through financial incentives, and they may reshape the landscape of research. The network is empowering individuals by linking them to one another, to information, and to a wide variety of resources. At the same time, the network has the potential to disempower institutions and to destabilize financial and labor markets. Open content and new Web revenue streams are simultaneously empowering the individual and facilitating the corporatization of services formally financed as public services, such as the library.

This Symposium will look at the question of how higher education institutions (The Tower) may interoperate with the emerging network-based business and social paradigm (The Cloud).

• Symposium agenda (Full details)

Speakers

• David Attis, Senior Director, Council on Competitiveness. Attis leads research for the Council’s Competitiveness Index and is deputy director of the National Innovation Initiative.
• Yochai Benkler, Professor, Yale Law School. Benkler is the author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.
• Larry Johnson, CEO, New Media Consortium. NMC is one of the leading developers of higher education learning environments within the synthetic world Second Life. Johnson will lead a discussion panel of educators who are using these environments for instruction.
• Susan Solomon, Senior Scientist, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. Solomon was awarded the National Medal of Science for her pioneering work on the ozone layer. She led the 500-person scientific team that published the January 2007 United Nations report on global warming and human activity.
• Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor, Kansas State University. Wesch is an anthropologist who is studying the impacts of digital technology on human interaction. His video Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us became the most viewed video on YouTube on February 7, 2007.

Schedule

To assist you with travel plans, the symposium schedule follows.